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  • George Mgrdichian

    GEORGE MGRDICHIAN

    The Independent - United Kingdom; May 26, 2006
    Ken Hunt

    The oud or'ud entered European languages with borrowings such as lute,
    luth, laud and Laute. The instrument itself took longer to enter the
    musical vocabulary. During the early to late 1960s, the oud travelled
    further than it had ever done in terms of public awareness in Europe
    and North America. Arguably, two musicians were the great torchbearers
    for the instrument. One was the Nubian oud maestro Hamza El Din. The
    other was George Mgrdichian, a Philadelphia-raised American of
    Christian-Armenian stock.

    Oud had been an instrument of expatriate communities with disparate
    roots in the Near East, Middle East and Transcaucasus. Mgrdichian had
    taken up oud, self-taught, as a result of initially playing on the
    Armenian wedding, party and dance circuit as a clarinettist. When the
    band's oud player got called up to do military service, Mgrdichian was
    volunteered to take over. It became his main instrument and he
    developed a singular fluidity of touch, a modern mixture of the purist
    and the pragmatist.

    Mgrdichian went to New York in the 1960s to study clarinet, and there
    fell into a circle of folk andjazz musicians. In the jazz realm,
    Mgrdichian went on to work with the bandleader Dave Brubeck, the
    saxophonist Phil Woods and the fringe musician and composer David
    Amram. He also played with the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City
    Opera, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic.

    During the 1970s he played oud on a number of albums in a style that
    was popularly or jocularly known as belly dance. The likes of Let's
    Belly Dance (1973), Chimera - a fantasy in jazz/ rock/mid-east sounds
    (1974) and Belly Dance Navel Academy Vol2 (1977) prove that one
    generation's bad taste becomes another generation's collectibles.

    Fortunately, Mgrdichian's career flourished in other areas. He was an
    innovator on the instrument, adapting traditional playing techniques
    while remaining within traditional playing styles. He was innovative
    in his left-hand fingering style on the oud in a way that, say,
    L. Subramaniam has been in playing the Karnatic violin, through using
    all four fingers of the left hand.

    Aside from working on sessions for other people for ABC, CBS
    Master-works, RCA Victor, Sefarad and Vanguard, Mgrdichian led a
    separate recording life as a soloist or leader of his own George
    Mgrdichian Ensemble. These recordings concentrated on an Armenian or
    Anatolian improvised repertoire and took what the pioneering Armenian
    musicologist Komitas Vardapet would have called "la musique rustique
    armenienne" beyond the Armenian diaspora into the wider world.

    >From the 1980s onwards, Mgrdichian's recordings appeared on a variety
    of labels, with titles such as The Oud (1985),
    InstrumentalArmenianFolkDances (1988) and One Man's Passion (1997).

    Ken Hunt
    George Mgrdichian, oud player: born Philadelphia 28January 1935' died
    New York 30 April 2006.
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